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Saturday, February 23, 2013

Raw Thug - "Black Walmart" (Loin Seepage)

In my year or
so of posting reviews to this great cassette label resource I've had
the pleasure of receiving a RUN THE GAMUT assortment of tapes from folks
all over the world. I've gotten sharpie scrawled TDK lo-fi shoulder
shrug music and I've gotten as professional a packaging as I ever
remember buying up as a kid at K-Mart, but I've never gotten a tape in a
sock until now. Loin Seepage is a new label to me (and thankfully I've
never experienced actual seeping!) and damn if I'm not surprised by the
presentation. The artist is Raw Thug (I presume) and the album is titled
Black Walmart. The sock came in a red paperback by the way...see
image...anyway, the music is of the concrete stylie, with voice chatter
loops, sirens, general clang, some musical instruments (sax, drums,
keys), you name it all whizzing and circling 'round. Kind of sorta very
JOHN & YOKO...minus the nude cover art. I like this shit, but its
certainly meant for a limited audience. Oh, and thanks for the socks!

"I always used to say to my sister, “You have to find something you’re
passionate about; until then, you’ll always be unhappy.” I review music
in order to have passion myself, and my reward? Fucking cassette tapes,
fucking shoved inside a tube sock like a schoolboy’s nutt. What has the
world come to?
Come to find out, actually, that Raw Thug truly comes out
on “Black Walmart,” a series of ghostly non-interactions with nothing:
location nowhere. So spare you can drop a pin and disrupt its axis, so
dim/dark/distant you need to shine a light on it just to see a quarter
of what’s going on, so personal it’s as if he’s playing in a room
upstairs. Convenient, because that’s about the fidelity we’re working
with here, a ghost of a shadow of a memory. I tried eating a sandwich
while listening and realized I was missing it all; well, I’ll miss that
Reuben!
What really gets my attention is the spirit hovering by the
microphone at the beginning of Side A. It’s creepy, and fascinating, to
try and figure out what’s happening there. As our tour through this
special breed of “Walmart” continues that mood, that ghostly,
shudder-inducing feel never lets up. It’s like listening to a radio flip
between stations that don’t exist, sometimes slowly, sometimes
instantly, themes coming and going with little regard to how they mesh
together. A brief cheese-board interlude threatens to blight the
atmosphere, but it is soon absorbed into Raw Thug’s vision (not the kind
you can see but the kind you can’t) and, aptly, discarded with nary a
warning.
The flip conjures the same demons that haunted me at the beginning of
the front-side. It’s fucking gorgeous. As far as I know it’s just a
dude getting all gay on an unwitting microphone, and that’s fine as long
as it works, and it does. It’s like Babe, Terror
suspended in space, looking for something to grab onto. He knows
nothing will save him, but he must cling to hope because that’s all
that’s left in these parts. Life is a cruel bitch-mother, I think we
will all agree, so don’t leave anything out on that stage and never,
EVER listen to music that doesn’t thrill you.
The lazer show halfway through Side B, indebted to Wired
Open 2009 as it is, is another awe-inspiring sound for sore
ears that makes you feel like you should be witnessing it from a
sleeping bag in the woods with you friends and family. And it’s 1989,
and you’re 12, and some older chick wants you to get in her sleeping bag
and you’re scared (this actually happened).
It’s all so well-considered. A slight compliment, on the surface, but
that’s really what makes all the difference to jaded blokes like
myself. Anyone can fuck-blast out 10 tapes a month of total shit and
maybe even find a home for it all; very few abandon the shortcuts
complicit in drone altogether and just wing it. And if they do, they
often seem lost, like a little kid at an amusement park with a wristband
and no mommy or a newscaster without his cue cards. So many artists
can’t handle the freedom of 60 minutes of tape; they go crazy, they
worship Tangerine Dream until it’s not fun anymore, they start side bands when no one likes their real band; it’s fucked up.
As I get ready to shut this review down like a full parking garage a
whistling sound cascades over meandering saxophones … These instances I
foreshadow for you sound so much more meaningful than they read
that I hope you’ll seek this title out and listen to it in a dark room
in your boxers with your belly hanging out for the world to see just as I
am right now, the ear-art snaking through your brain, bleaching away
the impurities of the day preceding. It’s worth it to get 25 SHIT-ASS
tapes just to get one like this that captures my imagination like a bear
trap and never loosens its grip go no matter how many minutes and
precious tape-twists pass by like audio milemarkers.
If some random dude were to knock on my door and ask about time
travel casually, and if I knew anyone who could accomplish such a thing,
I would probably refer him to Raw Thug and hope that they wouldn’t
change the fate of the human race by the time they’re done. That’s
actually true, not just a plot device. Though, as plot devices go, it’s a
damn ripe one. Fuck life is all carrot-juice and steak-slaw, I tell
you! Embrace it, and me."